50 Cent Bulletproof

We can put it in the books: games based on rappers don’t make the greatest video games. Alright, Def Jam Vendetta was decent, but that’s about it. Sadly, 50 Cent: Bulletproof only reaffirms these facts. It’s not just that the game was designed bad, which it was, considering that it gets almost none of the gaming fundamentals right at all, but the really bad part about the game is how obvious it is that the developers put absolutely no effort into the game what-so-ever.

You see, it’s one thing to at least attempt to try and make a decent game. It’s a whole other obscenity to take a hot product, such as 50 Cent, and take advantage of that product by putting out the absolute worst material based on that product. Given the immense popularity of gang style games with plenty of attitude and the popularity of 50 Cent himself, 50 Cent: Bulletproof could have conceivably been a pretty decent game. In the end, however, 50 Cent: Bulletproof might as well have never have been made.
So what is so bad about the game, you ask? Well, let’s begin with how the game is presented. The visuals in the game, starting with the very character models themselves, are absolutely horrid. The characters, even 50 Cent himself, look mostly nothing like their real life counterparts and are extremely poorly designed and detailed. These bad character models shine only even more thanks to the fact that the character animations are few, and what few there are tend to be very clunky and poorly implemented.

The environments are very bland and sparse. For that matter, almost every graphical aspect of the game is pretty bland. The developers almost got it right, however, since they attempted to make the game extremely dark. On one hand, the developers attempted to hide the terrible visuals by the sheer fact that gamers wouldn’t notice them. Nice one, except for the fact that the game tends to be much too dark, making the gameplay experience very annoying at times as you try to journey through a ridiculously dark work.

Even the sound of the game, which should be a high point, really was implemented very well. Given the fact that the developers could use anything G-Unit, yes, that incredibly popular G-Unit, to make up the sound department, they still managed to fail. They used the licenses extremely poorly and the game really doesn’t have any good music, and it definitely isn’t fitting to the situations. You might end up just turning down the volume for the majority of the game.

As would be expected, the story gives no alleviation to the problems created by the game. It is extremely predictable and unoriginal: a friend has been caught in some problems and he calls you, 50 Cent, and the rest of G-Unit to his aid. Naturally, 50 Cent brings help and plenty of gun-toting gangstas along with him to try to get his friend out of trouble. Of course, the story developers and 50 Cent is soon in the thick of it himself.

Well, how is the actual gameplay, you might ask? Terrible, I would answer! The game, in essence, is set up very similarly to other third-person shooters, such as Max Payne and the like, however it executes none of the gameplay aspects nearly as well as those games. The problems start with the core of the gameplay: the shooting. Thanks to an annoying camera, twitchy controls, and an absolutely terrible aiming system. It’s bad enough that the weapons are so inaccurate, but its even worse when its hard to aim at the enemies in the first place.

Maybe it’s good that the game doesn’t have any replay value, since no one will want to actually play the game again anyway. Truly though, the game offers almost no reason to come back once the relatively short single player campaign is completed. For this reason, 50 Cent: Bulletproof can only be recommended at the best even for fans of G-Unit who absolutely must play the game to feel their lives are complete.